A provocative doctoral research on the factors influencing CEOs of US-based publicly traded companies in deviating from long-term strategies for short-term objectives. The research was based on interviews with CEOs of companies ranging from $10 million to $12 billion in annual revenue. It was found that most CEOs regarded internal organization issues as most detrimental to execution of long-term strategies. Conversely, CEOs considered Wall Street expectations, SEC regulations, stock downtrends, and liabilities costly and time-consuming, but not detrimental to execution of long-term strategies. Paradoxically, most CEOs still assigned first priority to shareholders over customers and employees by a large margin. This set of internal factors and priorities assigned to external factors, is the conflicting dilemma, which hindered CEOs' effective execution of long-term strategies.